Anyone that's directly supported users with their computer issues knows what I mean. You have people that are so afraid to do anything on their computer because they fear they'll do something wrong or break it. Then...you've got the other end of the spectrum, where people completely abuse the living daylights out of their tech. It's those people that accidental damage protection warranties had in mind.
We used to have a user, who I'm just going to refer to as Miss R. She had to be out in the field often, doing health inspections, so she was given a small Fujitsu Lifebook and a portable Canon inkjet printer. During her employment, hers was the only laptop that needed to have the USB ports replaced (the side-effect of keeping your USB cables plugged in when jamming your notebook into it's zip case). Also, I got constant complaints about her inkjet printer.
The first problem was when she needed to change out the ink carts. Now this Canon printer can work in two modes: pure black and white, using just one Black cartridge, or color, using a small black cart and a small color cart. When you use the two cartridges, there is a little caddy that the cartridges go into before it gets inserted into the printer - if you use just the large black cartridge, you use a different caddy. Unfortunately, when Miss R decided to change out the color cartridge for the large black and white only cartridge, she literally shoved the black cartridge into the color caddy so hard that it destroyed the caddy. Fortunately, she didn't need to print color anyway.
Later, though, I would get constant calls about her printer halting during prints and various USB connection problems with it. It was during this time that we diagnosed her screwed up USB ports on her laptop and had them repaired. But the problems eventually continued again. So I had her send me her printer.
Among the damages done to her printer were damaged clips to hold the lid shut, the actual plastic shell of the printer coming apart, and a severely mangled USB port. Nothing a little hot glue and solder wouldn't fix. But still...it makes me cringe to think about how she treated it for it to end up in this sorry state. Needless to say, during the rest of her employement, we didn't give her any expensive tech equipment unless there was a full-coverage accidental damage protection warranty on it.
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